The vanishing man - Toronto Star

The vanishing man - Toronto Star

It so happened that another of my sisters had that year purchased multiple copies of a recently published book, and she had stuffed a volume into each of our stockings. The book in question recounts a journey that our paternal grandfather made in 1909 — by dogsled, no less — on a route that stretched from Quebec City, his home, to Newfoundland, a trek that lasted three turbulent months. Thanks to a variety of lucky circumstances, his journal had been published in book form, with an introduction and annotations by a Montreal academic named Philip E. L. Smith. Entitled In Quest of Fur: The Travel Journal of William O. K. Ross, 1909 , the book kept all of us rapt for the rest of that day, as we devoured our ancestor's tale of an almost mythic odyssey, an adventure that was previously all but unknown to... “Having decided to make another winter trip with my dogs and komatik (sled) down the Labrador coast, I had been quietly making notes of the different things which I would require such as (medicines) carbolic Vaseline, carbolic acid, assortment of...